Sappy

A real-time data tracking app of plants enabling users to follow, track and adopt nearby plants by leveraging the concepts of social networks and gamification.

My Role

This work was carried out for an Adobe Internal Hackathon, in a team of two. My role was to conceptualise the solution and provide all the necessary design deliverables essential for prototyping.

Awards

The submission was adjudged as the winner of the hackathon.

Context and Challenge

April, 2015 was celebrated as "Be Green" Month in Adobe India. As an Adobe CSR initiative, a Green Hackathon was organised with a fairly open ended brief to "Create a mobile or web application based on the Green theme" with a submission deadline of 1 week.

For submission, we conceptualised and developed a Real-time data tracking app of plants enabling users to follow, track and adopt nearby plants. The Intent was to create awareness among individuals about the “Being Green” by leveraging the concepts of Social Networks and gamification.

Design approach

We opted for a lean approach model wherein we emphasised quick conceptualisation, rapid design mocks, over the shoulder user feedback and prototyping. This created early alignment among the two of us and a strong sense of ownership across different disciplines.

The Research

We did a quick research and found that over and under watering is one of the foremost reasons for killing houseplants and gardens. So we decided to design a solution catering to this painpoint.

The Solution

We created sappy using Arduino which records moisture level of your plants and helps them communicate with people. It helps you to talk to your plant and remind you when its time to water your plants.

Just plug the sappy in the soil of the plant and you are ready to go. Once the sensor determines the moisture level of the plant it sends back the information to your mobile app where you can keep a check. You get custom notifications to remind you when its time to water your plants.

Another major aspect of our solution is to encourage onlookers to voluntarily save dying plants and create a community of plant lovers. Sappy sensor kit includes a LED and a unique QR code for each plant. Whenever the moisture level of the plant reduces/falls below the safe limit it turns Red visually signifying the onlookers about that attention is needed. People can then volunteer to save the plant by watering it and scan the QR code to be a part of the community. Plant owners get customised notifications about all the activities and can connect each other on various social platforms to be a part of the same community.

Short video demo that we did for the Hackathon. The users can explore all nearby plants and follow them to be updated about their water levels. If any of the user's followed plants is short of water, they get notified about the same.

User Flow of App. The highlighted steps depict the MVP.

Setup used for prototyping. Arduino Yun (Linino - light weight linux) and Soil Moisture Sensor were used as hardware.

Some application screenshots from the prototype.

[Update] Recently, I got a day off and decided to do a quick UI for the app (based on ios12 guidelines). The excercise made me think about micro interactions in more detail and add value to existing concept.

My Learnings

This project was done under a very short span of 1 week. It gave me an experience to work in a lean model and taught me the importance of early alignment and ownership among teams especially in projects with aggressive deadlines.

Know More

That's it for now! You can get in touch to know more about this project or you can read through more case studies below. Thanks for reading!